


The Reasons I Can't Let You Go

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Series: A Word Here, An Act There [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series - Aaron Allston & Michael Stackpole
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Clone Wars, Corellia, Grief/Mourning, Multi, Polyamory, Star Wars: I Jedi - Freeform, alternate POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 09:58:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17098457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: “He says he is an old friend. Someone named Halcyon.”Rostek didn’t know who this person was. He didn’t know who he could be, but whoever he was, heknew.(A retelling of Corran's return to Corellia in Michael Stackpole's novelI, Jedi, from Rostek's point of view.)





	The Reasons I Can't Let You Go

**Author's Note:**

> I'm including this in the "A Word Here, An Act There" series even though it's technically official Legends canon instead of the series' AU. Think of it as an AU to the AU; or, more unsettling, the Dark Future version of "At Their Own Speed and Peril".

**_Eleven years after the Battle of Yavin:_ **

“He says he is an old friend. Someone named Halcyon.”

_Halcyon._

Rostek didn’t know who this person was. He didn’t know who he _could_ be, but whoever he was, he knew.

Vader and his Jedi hunters were long gone, but who knows what the Diktat would do? There were enough Imperial sympathizers out there that Rostek still had to be careful.

But who could they possibly hurt, now? Scerra was gone. Valin was gone. Corran had fled to the Rebellion.

And if they wanted to hurt Rostek, well… he had nothing to lose. Not anymore.

“Bring Halcyon to the garden,” he told Tosruk, trying to ignore the way the name caught in his throat. “I will meet him there.”

Rostek went to find his suit coat. It was the closest he could come to dressing for battle.

* * *

**_Thirty-one years earlier:_ **

He really should be listening to what the Caamasi Jedi was saying. Rostek knew that he should, but the words all blurred into a warm haze, one that he desperately wanted to sink down into and sleep.

He had to listen to what the Caamasi was saying because Rostek knew that Scerra wasn’t listening. He didn’t have to look at her to know that she had retreated inside her own head, trying to work out a solution for a problem that didn’t have a solution, a problem that could never have a solution.

“…he was mortally wounded, beyond our abilities to save him.” The Caamasi Jedi—It’kla, he said his name was—spoke in a calm, gentle voice. His large eyes were sympathetic. He obviously knew enough to know that Rostek and Scerra needed to be told. Enough to know that they would grieve. Enough that he brought them what personal effects the Order had not kept.

Not enough to bring his body back to them. Not enough to ask about Valin. Not enough to know what Nejaa Halcyon really was to them.

Nejaa was gone.

Rostek didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to hear this. He wanted to continue to think that Nejaa was just away, fighting a war, doing what he did best: saving the galaxy, one outrageous action at a time. Rostek knew how to miss Nejaa; he and Scerra had spent a long time getting used to missing Nejaa. It had been a constant in their marriage: Nejaa was a Jedi and that meant that sometimes he had to leave home, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes for longer.

But he came back. He always came back.

He had to come back.

They had always been a trio. Side by side, a hand in each hand.

Only now…

Rostek didn’t remember the Caamasi Jedi leaving. He didn’t remember what happened next. All he remembered were his hands and Scerra’s hands and the realization that the absence they were both feeling would never go away.

* * *

**_A year later:_ **

Scerra was in a frenzy when Rostek returned home from work. She had seen the news; they had both seen the news. The Republic was gone and everything was in chaos.

The Chancellor—no, the Emperor now—had declared the Jedi Order an enemy of the state. They were being hunted down.

Rostek saw the holoimages in her hands. He saw the robes, folded up on top of the box that the Caamasi brought them. Everything. She was gathering everything.

“We have time,” Rostek said, trying to calm her down. No, not calm her down—trying to calm _himself_ down. “He’s already gone; we won’t be a high priority.”

“We _don’t_ have time,” Scerra retorted. “They’ll come eventually, asking if we know about any other Jedi. There’s a record that you were partners at CorSec—and if there is _any_ sign that he was anything more than that, they’ll look closer, they’ll find everything, they’ll—”

“We can hide it,” he said urgently. “We can hide it, we can wait until things calm down. Scerra, we have time—”

“Rostek, no! We have to get rid of everything. We can’t risk it.” She put the stack of holos on the top of the pile. He moved to snatch them away but she grabbed him by the wrists. “You know that we don’t have any other choice.”

He tried pulling his wrists away but she hung on with a surprising amount of strength. “You can’t destroy them, Scerra—“ He tried again to get past her but all he managed to do was push her backwards. Scerra bumped into the pile of Nejaa’s things and sent the holos crashing to the floor.

Startled, she released him. Rostek dropped to his knees and started gathering them up. The image he picked up, however, was the first picture they ever took together: Nejaa had gotten to the image capture button first, but Scerra was right behind him, practically climbing over his shoulder, her arm reaching out while Rostek lost his composure and started laughing. It was messy, unplanned, and utterly joyous: just like they had been.

“Rostek,” Scerra said, kneeling next to him.

“I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.” He couldn’t look away from their past selves. “It feels like we’re killing him.” Rostek’s fingers tightened on the image. “Like he’s dying all over again.”

“These things aren’t him,” she said, taking his arm. “Getting rid of them doesn’t get rid of him.”

“We spent so long hiding…” Rostek said, feeling ready to fold in on himself. “I thought it would be enough.”

“This doesn’t take him away,” Scerra repeated. “Rostek, if we don’t do this, if we don’t make sure… they’re going to find out about Valin.”

Rostek looked at the holos strewn across the floor. Dozens of memories frozen in time.

He picked up another image. Valin must have been only a few days old when it was taken. Nejaa was a Jedi who could do things that were beyond impossible, but Rostek had never before seen the kind of awe that Nejaa’s face had in that picture, watching his son open his eyes and realizing that they were the exact same shade of green as his own.

Valin was grown now; Nejaa had trained him in secret, away from the Jedi Order, before the Clone Wars upended their plans. After Nejaa died, Valin decided to follow in Rostek’s footsteps and become a CorSec officer. He was seeing a young woman, angling for a promotion to Inspector… he had a life.

They had to protect him. He was their son.

He was all they had left.

“I’ll deal with these,” Rostek told Scerra as he gathered up the rest of the holos.

Scerra never found out that he didn’t get rid of them.

He knew it was a risk, but he couldn’t bear to let go.

* * *

**_Time passes:_ **

He couldn’t bear to let go of so many things, but they were gone all the same.

The disease that took away Scerra was mercifully quick. It was the one thing he could reassure himself with afterwards. She didn’t suffer much. She wasn’t in much pain. She passed on with as much dignity as she could.

She lived long enough to see her son get married, long enough to meet her grandson and have enough years with Corran that he remembered her after she was gone.

Despite the fact that Rostek, Valin, and now Corran worked for CorSec and put their lives on the line on a near-daily basis, it was Valin’s wife, Nyche, who died next. Valin met her when he pulled her over for speeding, and she never quite lost that bad habit. The landspeeder accident killed her instantly; like her mother-in-law, the fact that it was quick was the only comforting thing about it.

Valin died only a few years after that. It was in the line of duty: a Trandoshan bounty hunter by the name of Bossk shot him. Corran was there when it happened; Valin died in his son’s arms.

Rostek was now the only one left alive who knew Nejaa and knew who he was to Rostek and Scerra. When he slept, it was between two absences. His hands always felt empty.

Rostek thought about the secrets he had buried in the yard. One day, he told himself, he would tell Corran where his green eyes came from, but not yet. He could barely look at Corran anymore; his grandson looked too much like everyone Rostek had lost.

Then Corran was framed for murder and there was nothing Rostek could do to fix it. Corran fled the planet and eventually found his way to the Rebellion. The Diktat still censored nearly everything but it was impossible to disguise the fact that the Empire was losing. Corran was one of the pilots who liberated Coruscant. He was a war hero.

Nejaa would have been so proud of him.

Corran found ways to communicate with him, though by the time his messages got through the censors they were nearly unreadable. But he was alive.

He was all Rostek had left.

* * *

**_Soon:_ **

Rostek was retired now. It was less of a retirement and more of an _escape_ , given the way that the Diktat had transformed CorSec into something unrecognizable since then. It was such a small-minded thing to do: to take one of the last decent things on Corellia and warp it into another tool of an Empire that no longer even really existed. The Diktat seemed eager to erase the real past in favor of an imaginary one.

Rostek saved what he could: people, history, and a lifetime's accumulation of useful data. It had started as a way of keeping himself informed back when he was first appointed Director of CorSec, but in the years that followed it grew into something that he could only now freely admit was leverage.

He knew exactly what piece of information any given toady of the Diktat or the Empire would dread having exposed the most.

They all knew that he knew, so they burned down his house, as well as Valin and Nyche's old house. Of course, afterwards, they rebuilt it for him, full of cameras and recording devices and all the bugs they could stuff in there, and staffed by employees who would report on everything he did.

However, they didn't know that Rostek had spent almost his entire adult life hiding the things that were most precious to him. He knew how to keep secrets and he knew better than to conceal them in such obvious places.

Things were best kept buried, under the ground, like seeds.

He knew how to plant things: his household staff were all people he had selected and put in positions where they appeared loyal to those in power.

He planted his secret files everywhere, eventually. But he still knew how to keep secrets, and those secrets included the decryption codes.

He planted roses. It was a constructive way to spend his time, it was full of interesting challenges and, as a bonus, he turned out to be very good at it, especially at creating new hybrids through genetic manipulation.

It would have been enough but, rather than becoming sentimental in his old age, Rostek was apparently becoming more mischievous. Genes were just pieces of information, after all: how could he resist planting the decryption keys into the genetic codes of his roses… and then sending a bouquet to whatever politician he had decided to torment with an encrypted file this week?

No one had the patience to gene sequence a flower for clues, apparently. Well, he had to keep himself entertained somehow…

He thought about the other things he had planted in that garden. Things buried much deeper than flowers.

One day, they too would grow and, hopefully, bloom.

* * *

  ** _Now:_ **

Rostek decided that if he was about to be murdered, he might as well die in his garden, well-dressed and with dignity.

Tosruk showed the stranger through the back doors, but put out an arm to keep him from going any further. It was sweet of his employee, Rostek thought, to think that he could do anything to stop an assassination or whatever other calamity might be about to occur here.

“It has been a long time, Director. Perhaps you do not remember me.”

Rostek looked at the newcomer and froze.

For a moment, he thought that he _was_ dying, that it was a heart attack and that the very last thing he was going to see was a hallucination of Nejaa standing right there in his garden, only apparently Nejaa was somehow still going to be utterly exasperating even in death because he had dyed his hair and goatee blond for some ridiculous reason and—

Something, an image or a memory, flashed through his thoughts. It wasn't his own, though he did know _what_ it was: one couldn't be married to a Jedi for over two decades without knowing what it was like to have an image projected into one's mind through the Force.

He saw a little boy, running around in the grass, looking like everyone Rostek had ever loved.

His grandson. Corran.

And if he was using the pseudonym Halcyon and using the Force then it meant that he _knew_. Not everything, in all likelihood, but enough to know that Nejaa existed.

It was a terrible risk, him coming back to Corellia, so he was surely here to get answers.

Rostek had so many answers to give him.

“Tosruk, he is known to me,” Rostek said at last, and dismissed his employee back into the house.

Something that was taken had finally returned, and with it came the knowledge that he no longer had to worry about letting go of Nejaa or of all the memories and secrets that Rostek had kept all these years. He could pass them on and, by doing so, he could keep his family—all of them—alive.

In order to unearth what had been buried, though, he was going to need to grab a shovel or two. To his grandson's annoyance, Corran was tasked with the actual digging. “I did my part in burying it,” he pointed out when Corran complained.

Rostek leaned on the second shovel and watched the past return to life.


End file.
